https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subway_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cin%C3%A9ma_du_look
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
cabin fever (Daseinsanalysis)
船上水兵上岸後終日奔馳
最近常聽到報復兩字
報復性出遊報復性消費
報復是生命能量被積壓
已久後的釋放
它明顯是一種發熱
本質上沒有惡意
所有過猶不及物極必返
都在旅途中 (on the road)
這讓我想起Vanlife的Chad和Chrome
尤其是Chrome
最近常聽到報復兩字
報復性出遊報復性消費
報復是生命能量被積壓
已久後的釋放
它明顯是一種發熱
本質上沒有惡意
所有過猶不及物極必返
都在旅途中 (on the road)
這讓我想起Vanlife的Chad和Chrome
尤其是Chrome
二和三 (Daseinsanalysis)
人類的腦部結構
只能處理二
意思是說
你碰到的三
其實還是二
但上述是有問題的
比如說中國哲學的儒釋道
心理學的三大典範精神分析行為主義人本心理學
和有名的三國演義
都是三的例子
但三必然引起合縱連橫
所以本質上仍然是二
想起這件事是因為系譜學的關係
那天我說系譜學在尋找話語系統的裂縫
在兩個或兩個以上的次系統之間的權力的辯證
找到話語系統演變的歷史
這件事說明那個院子裡
有三棵樹是必要的
只能處理二
意思是說
你碰到的三
其實還是二
但上述是有問題的
比如說中國哲學的儒釋道
心理學的三大典範精神分析行為主義人本心理學
和有名的三國演義
都是三的例子
但三必然引起合縱連橫
所以本質上仍然是二
想起這件事是因為系譜學的關係
那天我說系譜學在尋找話語系統的裂縫
在兩個或兩個以上的次系統之間的權力的辯證
找到話語系統演變的歷史
這件事說明那個院子裡
有三棵樹是必要的
8:03 AM (Daseinsanalysis)
於是你知此生
只剩下一天
創造力是否來自
缺席的父親
管教(Discipline)來自話語系統
左腦的語言是關鍵
所以父親藏在左腦
大家都說右腦是真正的家
左腦只不過是信差
所以父親不是家
我面前的山
是父親還是母親
是左腦還是右腦
只剩下一天
創造力是否來自
缺席的父親
管教(Discipline)來自話語系統
左腦的語言是關鍵
所以父親藏在左腦
大家都說右腦是真正的家
左腦只不過是信差
所以父親不是家
我面前的山
是父親還是母親
是左腦還是右腦
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Postmodern University (Daniel Burston, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020-1-31)
Critical theory draws on Marxism, psychoanalysis, postmodern and poststructuralist theorists. Marxism and psychoanalysis are rooted in the Enlightenment project, while postmodernism and poststructuralism are more indebted to Nietzsche, whose philosophy is rooted in anti-Enlightenment ideas and ideals. Marxism and psychoanalysis contributed mightily to our understanding of fascism and authoritarianism, but were distorted and disfigured by authoritarian tendencies and practices in turn. This book, written for clinicians and social scientists, explores these overarching themes, focusing on the reception of Freud in America, the authoritarian personality and American politics, Lacan’s “return to Freud,” Jordan Peterson and the Crisis of the Liberal Arts, and the anti-psychiatry movement. (amazon)
Accessing the Clinical Genius of Winnicott: A Careful Rendering of Winnicott’s Twelve Most Influential Clinical papers (Teri Quatman, Routledge, 2020-4-2)
Donald Winnicott, psychoanalyst and pediatrician, is viewed by many in the psychodynamic field as the “other genius” in the history of psychodynamic theory and practice, along with Freud. This book selects and explores twelve of his most influential clinical papers.
Winnicott’s works have been highly valued in the decades since they were first published, and are still relevant today. Winnicott’s writings on the goals and techniques of psychodynamic psychotherapy have been foundational, in that he recast Freudian- and Kleinian-infl uenced thinking in the direction of the more relational schools of psychotherapy that define current 21st-century psychodynamic practice. Winnicott’s writings help us to understand the maturational processes of children, certainly. But more than that, they help us to understand how best to intervene when the enterprise of childhood leads to compromises of psychological health in later years. Yet, despite Winnicott’s influence and continuing relevance, his writings, while at some level simple, are elusive to modern readers. For one thing, he writes in the psychoanalytic genre of the 1930s-1960s, whose underlying theoretical assumptions and vocabulary are obscure in the present day and, for another, his writing often reflects primary process thinking, which is suggestive, but not declarative. In this work, Teri Quatman provides explanations and insight, in an interlocution with Winnicott’s most significant papers, exploring both his language and concepts, and enabling the clinician to emerge with a deep and reflective understanding of his thoughts, perspectives, and techniques. (amazon)
Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past (Thomas A. Kohut, Routledge, 2020-4-8)
Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is a comprehensive consideration of the role of empathy in historical knowledge, informed by the literature on empathy in fields including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and sociology.
The book seeks to raise the consciousness of historians about empathy, by introducing them to the history of the concept and to its status in fields outside of history. It also seeks to raise the self-consciousness of historians about their use of empathy to know and understand past people. Defining empathy as thinking and feeling, as imagining, one’s way inside the experience of others in order to know and understand them, Thomas A. Kohut distinguishes between the external and the empathic observational position, the position of the historical subject. He argues that historians need to be aware of their observational position, of when they are empathizing and when they are not. Indeed, Kohut advocates for the deliberate, self-reflective use of empathy as a legitimate and important mode of historical inquiry. (amazon) (kindle 2020-6-15)
Nothing to It: Reading Freud as a Philosopher (Emmanuel Falque, Leuven University Press, 2020-4-15)
The confrontation between philosophy and psychoanalysis has had its heyday. After the major debates between Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Henry, this dialogue now seems to have broken down. It has therefore proven necessary and gainful to revisit these debates to explore their re-usability and the degree to which they can provide new insights from a contemporary point of view. It can be said that contemporary philosophy suffers from an 'excess of meaning', and this is exactly where psychoanalysis comes in and may raise key questions. This is precisely what a philosophical reading of Freud demonstrates. To say 'Nothing to It' indicates that the 'It'―or Freudian Id―is not visible as it never shows itself as a 'phenomenon'. Such a reading of Freud exemplifies how psychoanalysis has a special role to play in phenomenology's development. (amazon)
ROCK MUSIC AND PSYCHOANALYSIS (Lewis Aron, et al., Frenis Zero, 2020-2-10)
Many books deal with this subject, but not so many are written by analysts (such as Lewis Aron and Heather Ferguson) who play rock or pop music. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts have multi-layered identities. With regards to psychoanalysts, on one side, the discover that some of the most famous of them play (or even compose) music evokes several question: how their musical practice influences their therapeutic work? How their learning music and psychoanalytic training have been interlaced? How the evolution of their clinical theorisations has gone together with their reflection about music and its psychological aspects? Not all contributors of this book are psychoanalysts: Joseph LeDoux is an influential neuroscientist, whose investigations have become precious clues for psychoanalysis, plus he is the founder of music band “Amygdaloids”; and Rod Tweedy is an essayist and editor whose chapter deals with David Bowie. Anyway their interests show that music, and pop/rock music in particular, have oriented consistently their scientific output. (amazon)
Monday, April 20, 2020
3/2 (Daseinsanalysis)
4/20 8:00 AM, cloudy, not warm; 4/21 4:11 AM, 8:00 AM case conference; 9:30 AM, team meeting; then ward round; 11:00 AM, five consults to go;
Sunday, April 19, 2020
BILD EDITOR-IN-CHIEF RESPONDS TO THE CHINESE PRESIDENT "You are endangering the world“
https://www.bild.de/politik/international/bild-international/bild-chief-editor-responds-to-the-chinese-president-70098436.bild.html
2. Surveillance is a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free, is not creative. A nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything . This is why you have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft.
Dear President Xi Jinping
Your embassy in Berlin has addressed me in an open letter because we asked in our newspaper BILD whether China should pay for the massive economic damage the corona virus is inflicting worldwide.
Let me respond:
1. You rule by surveillance. You wouldn't be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country.
Your embassy in Berlin has addressed me in an open letter because we asked in our newspaper BILD whether China should pay for the massive economic damage the corona virus is inflicting worldwide.
Let me respond:
1. You rule by surveillance. You wouldn't be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country.
You shut down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world.
2. Surveillance is a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free, is not creative. A nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything . This is why you have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft.
China enriches itself with the inventions of others, instead of inventing on its own. The reason China does not innovate and invent is that you don't let the young people in your country think freely. China’s greatest export hit (that nobody wanted to have, but which has nevertheless gone around the world) is Corona.
3. You, your government and your scientists had to know long ago that Corona is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn't respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan.
You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.
4. The "Washington Post" reports that your laboratories in Wuhan have been researching corona viruses in bats, butwithout maintaining the highest safety standards. Why are your toxic laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners?
4. The "Washington Post" reports that your laboratories in Wuhan have been researching corona viruses in bats, butwithout maintaining the highest safety standards. Why are your toxic laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners?
Would you like to explain this to the grieving widows, daughters, sons, husbands, parents of Corona victims all over the world?
5. In your country, your people are whispering about you. Your power is crumbling. You have created an inscrutable, non-transparent China. Before Corona, China was known as a surveillance state. Now, China is known as a surveillance state that infected the world with a deadly disease.
5. In your country, your people are whispering about you. Your power is crumbling. You have created an inscrutable, non-transparent China. Before Corona, China was known as a surveillance state. Now, China is known as a surveillance state that infected the world with a deadly disease.
That is your political legacy.
Your embassy tells me that I am not living up to the "traditional friendship of our peoples.” I suppose you consider it a great "friendship" when you now generously send masks around the world. This isn’t friendship, I would call it imperialism hidden behind a smile – a Trojan Horse.
Your embassy tells me that I am not living up to the "traditional friendship of our peoples.” I suppose you consider it a great "friendship" when you now generously send masks around the world. This isn’t friendship, I would call it imperialism hidden behind a smile – a Trojan Horse.
You plan to strengthen China through a plague that you exported. You will not succeed. Corona will be your political end, sooner or later.
Yours sincerely
Julian Reichelt
Yours sincerely
Julian Reichelt
Trump confirms U.S. investigating reports virus came from Chinese lab (Bill Gertz, The Washington Times, 2020-4-17)
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/17/trump-confirms-us-investigating-reports-virus-came/
“They talk about a certain kind of bat, but that bat wasn’t in that area,” the president said. “. But that bat wasn’t sold at that wet zone,” he said referring to the wild animal market in Wuhan. “It wasn’t sold there. That bat was 40 miles away. A lot of strange things are happening.”
“They talk about a certain kind of bat, but that bat wasn’t in that area,” the president said. “. But that bat wasn’t sold at that wet zone,” he said referring to the wild animal market in Wuhan. “It wasn’t sold there. That bat was 40 miles away. A lot of strange things are happening.”
回到歷史 (Daseinsanalysis) (2020-4-19)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mx_nFd39prLdY5Nn7L3TywVfwluTZLVP/view?usp=sharing
Saturday, April 18, 2020
穀雨 (2020-4-19)
穀雨是二十四節氣中的第六個節氣，是春季的最後一個節氣，也是唯一將物候、時令與稼穡農事緊密對應的一個節氣。「清明斷雪，穀雨斷霜」，穀雨節氣的到來意味著寒潮天氣已結束，極利於農作物中穀類作物的生長。有意思的是，此時中國江南地區秧苗初插、作物新種，最需要雨水的滋潤，恰好此時的雨水也較多，每年的第一場大雨一般就出現於此時，對水稻栽插和玉米、棉花的苗期生長有利。
物候
- 萍始生：萍，水草也，與水相萍，故曰萍；漂流隨風，故又曰漂。《曆解》曰：「萍，陰物，靜以承陽也。」
- 鳴鳩扶其羽：鳩，即鷹所化者，布穀也；拂，過擊也。《本草》云：「拂羽飛而翼拍，其身氣使然也。」蓋當三月之時，趨農急矣，鳩乃追逐而鳴，鼓羽直刺上飛，故俗稱布穀。
- 戴勝降於桑：戴勝，一名戴鵀。《爾雅》注曰：「頭上有勝毛，此時恆在於桑。」蓋蠶將生之候矣；言降者，重之，若天而下，亦氣使之然也。
解侯：
- 浮萍不能經霜，故浮萍生意味著倒春寒一類的降溫不會再發生了。如果水面不生浮萍，則說明陰寒之氣極盛，倒春寒的現象會出現。
- 鳴鳩是因為此時鳩春鳴性也，有求偶之意；拂其羽，因為其時當換羽矣，其羽又甚厚，故梳理以示美。當然，人們還通過觀察，認識到，「鳴鳩不拂其羽，國不治」。就是說，這樣的鳥到此時不梳理其羽，說明時令不利於生物生育生長，天地違和，農作物極可能歉收，人間也難以政通人和。
- 而戴勝鳥降於桑樹，則提醒人們蠶寶寶將要生了。古人認為，如果戴勝鳥不落桑樹上，說明政令教化會落空。
5:01 AM (Daseinsanalysis)
低估四季春徹夜無眠
天明重返金陵
我說
我們有兩個選擇一是正常的一是不正常的
當然你知道我會選擇後者
這個選擇是正常的
這是一個後真實(Post-Truth)的年代
意思是說真相是一個滄桑的妓女
誰有槍桿子錢袋子誰就可以脫她的褲子
他們匆匆完事
穿起褲子之際
這時天色
微明山頭
天明重返金陵
我說
我們有兩個選擇一是正常的一是不正常的
當然你知道我會選擇後者
這個選擇是正常的
這是一個後真實(Post-Truth)的年代
意思是說真相是一個滄桑的妓女
誰有槍桿子錢袋子誰就可以脫她的褲子
他們匆匆完事
穿起褲子之際
這時天色
微明山頭
诺奖得主法国病毒学家称：病毒为人造，来自武汉实验室
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWegVNaRHbc
http://www.rfi.fr/tw/%E6%B3%95%E5%9C%8B/20200417-%E8%AB%BE%E8%B2%9D%E7%88%BE%E9%86%AB%E5%AD%B8%E8%AB%BE%E7%8D%8E%E5%BE%97%E4%B8%BB%E6%B3%95%E5%9C%8B%E7%97%85%E6%AF%92%E5%AD%B8%E5%AE%B6%E8%AA%8D%E7%82%BA%E5%86%A0%E7%8B%80%E7%97%85%E6%AF%92%E4%BE%86%E8%87%AA%E6%AD%A6%E6%BC%A2%E5%AF%A6%E9%A9%97%E5%AE%A4
http://www.rfi.fr/tw/%E6%B3%95%E5%9C%8B/20200417-%E8%AB%BE%E8%B2%9D%E7%88%BE%E9%86%AB%E5%AD%B8%E8%AB%BE%E7%8D%8E%E5%BE%97%E4%B8%BB%E6%B3%95%E5%9C%8B%E7%97%85%E6%AF%92%E5%AD%B8%E5%AE%B6%E8%AA%8D%E7%82%BA%E5%86%A0%E7%8B%80%E7%97%85%E6%AF%92%E4%BE%86%E8%87%AA%E6%AD%A6%E6%BC%A2%E5%AF%A6%E9%A9%97%E5%AE%A4
法國病毒學家，因研究艾滋病毒獲得2008年諾貝爾醫學獎的呂克·蒙塔尼耶教授（Pr Luc Montagnier）4月16日在醫學網pourquoidordeur.fr接受採訪時表示，目前全球大流行的冠狀病毒（Covid-19）來自武漢一個實驗室。此番言論引發廣泛關注和爭論。
蒙塔尼耶教授今天17日接受了法國C新聞網站（Cnews）的採訪。他說自己仍在從事病毒研究，但不一定在實驗室做實驗，他與同事（數學家）通過電腦工作。他說，我們得出了結論是，這個病毒被人操縱了，來自蝙蝠的病毒中，被加入了幾段艾滋病毒基因序列的小片段。這不是自然病毒，而是專業工作的結果，是分子生物學家做出來的，是一個特別精細的工作，可以說，像鐘錶匠一樣精細。
蒙塔尼耶教授表示，他的工作就是陳述事實，僅此而已。他不知道操縱這個病毒的人是誰，有什麼目的，他也不指控任何人。但他說，可能有人曾想做抗艾滋病的疫苗，把幾個艾滋病毒基因序列小片段加入到冠狀病毒的長段基因序列里。
蒙塔尼耶教授解釋說：病毒遺傳物質是一個長條的核糖核酸RNA，在這個RNA長條上的某些地方，有人加進去一些艾滋病毒小序列片段。這些小片段雖然小，但很重要，它們有可能修改“抗原位點”，也就是說，如果想製成一種疫苗，就完全可以通過另一種病毒的一段序列，來修改疫苗對接蛋白質。
針對有人說大部分科學權威都反駁他這個說法，他表示，想要扼殺這個說法的意願還是有的。這些工作，也並不是我們最先做的。在我們之前，一個印度非常有名的研究團隊公布了相同的結果，但有人強迫他們撤回了文章。不過，隨着越來越多的研究結果提出這樣的想法，反對的聲音已經比今年年初變少了。
What Science Tells Us about Autism Spectrum Disorder Making the Right Choices for Your Child (Raphael A. Bernier, Geraldine Dawson, Joel T. Nigg, The Guilford Press, 2020-2-5)
https://www.guilford.com/books/What-Science-Tells-Us-about-Autism-Spectrum-Disorder/Bernier-Dawson-Nigg/9781462536078?promo=QF254&utm_source=bm23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=What+Science+Tells+Us+about+Autism+Spectrum+Disorder&utm_content=kellychang2713@gmail.com&utm_campaign=Apr+%2720+Author+of+the+Month
Q&A
https://www.guilford.com/author-of-the-month/april-2020-bernier
Q&A
https://www.guilford.com/author-of-the-month/april-2020-bernier
Friday, April 17, 2020
Thursday, April 16, 2020
China didn’t warn public of likely pandemic for 6 key days (The Associated Press, 2020-4-16)
https://apnews.com/68a9e1b91de4ffc166acd6012d82c2f9
In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.
President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.
That delay from Jan. 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.
But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak. China’s attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected more than 2 million people and taken more than 133,000 lives.
“This is tremendous,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system.”
Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.
But the six-day delay by China’s leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan. 5 to Jan. 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.
It’s uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It’s also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine.
But what is clear, experts say, is that China’s rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for “rumor-mongering,” broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city’s hospitals.
“Doctors in Wuhan were afraid,” said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. “It was truly intimidation of an entire profession.”
Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan. 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases — distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients. They also instructed officials in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, to begin temperature checks at transportation hubs and cut down on large public gatherings. And they did it all without telling the public.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.
“Those accusing China of lacking transparency and openness are unfair,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday when asked about the AP story.
_________________________
The documents show that the head of China’s National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the situation on Jan. 14 in a confidential teleconference with provincial health officials. A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.
“The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event,” the memo cites Ma as saying.
The National Health Commission is the top medical agency in the country. In a faxed statement, the Commission said it had organized the teleconference because of the case reported in Thailand and the possibility of the virus spreading during New Year travel. It added that China had published information on the outbreak in an “open, transparent, responsible and timely manner,” in accordance with “important instructions” repeatedly issued by President Xi.
The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference. Some of the memo’s contents also appeared in a public notice about the teleconference, stripped of key details and published in February.
Under a section titled “sober understanding of the situation,” the memo said that “clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible.” It singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had “changed significantly” because of the possible spread of the virus abroad.
“With the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high,” the memo continued. “All localities must prepare for and respond to a pandemic.”
In the memo, Ma demanded officials unite around Xi and made clear that political considerations and social stability were key priorities during the long lead-up to China’s two biggest political meetings of the year in March. While the documents do not spell out why Chinese leaders waited six days to make their concerns public, the meetings may be one reason.
“The imperatives for social stability, for not rocking the boat before these important Party congresses is pretty strong,” says Daniel Mattingly, a scholar of Chinese politics at Yale. “My guess is, they wanted to let it play out a little more and see what happened.”
In response to the teleconference, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing initiated the highest-level emergency response internally, level one, on Jan. 15. It assigned top CDC leaders to 14 working groups tasked with getting funds, training health workers, collecting data, doing field investigations and supervising laboratories, an internal CDC notice shows.
The National Health Commission also distributed a 63-page set of instructions to provincial health officials, obtained by the AP. The instructions ordered health officials nationwide to identify suspected cases, hospitals to open fever clinics, and doctors and nurses to don protective gear. They were marked “internal” — “not to be spread on the internet,” “not to be publicly disclosed.”
In public, however, officials continued to downplay the threat, pointing to the 41 cases public at the time.
“We have reached the latest understanding that the risk of sustained human-to-human transmission is low,” Li Qun, the head of the China CDC’s emergency center, told Chinese state television on Jan. 15. That was the same day Li was appointed leader of a group preparing emergency plans for the level one response, a CDC notice shows.
On Jan. 20, President Xi issued his first public comments on the virus, saying the outbreak “must be taken seriously” and every possible measure pursued. A leading Chinese epidemiologist, Zhong Nanshan, announced for the first time that the virus was transmissible from person to person on national television.
If the public had been warned a week earlier to take actions such as social distancing, mask wearing and travel restrictions, cases could have been cut by up to two-thirds, one paper later found. An earlier warning could have saved lives, said Zhang, the doctor in Los Angeles.
However, other health experts said the government took decisive action in private given the information available to them.
“They may not have said the right thing, but they were doing the right thing,” said Ray Yip, the retired founding head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s office in China. “On the 20th, they sounded the alarm for the whole country, which is not an unreasonable delay.”
If health officials raise the alarm prematurely, it can damage their credibility — “like crying wolf” —and cripple their ability to mobilize the public, said Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.
The delay may support accusations by President Donald Trump that the Chinese government’s secrecy held back the world’s response to the virus. However, even the public announcement on Jan. 20 left the U.S. nearly two months to prepare for the pandemic.
During those months, Trump ignored the warnings of his own staff and dismissed the disease as nothing to worry about, while the government failed to bolster medical supplies and deployed flawed testing kits. Leaders across the world turned a blind eye to the outbreak, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling for a strategy of “herd immunity” — before falling ill himself. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro sneered at what he called “a little cold.”
_________________________
The early story of the pandemic in China shows missed opportunities at every step, the documents and AP interviews reveal. Under Xi, China’s most authoritarian leader in decades, increasing political repression has made officials more hesitant to report cases without a clear green light from the top.
“It really increased the stakes for officials, which made them reluctant to step out of line,” said Mattingly, the Yale professor. “It made it harder for people at the local level to report bad information.”
Doctors and nurses in Wuhan told Chinese media there were plenty of signs that the coronavirus could be transmitted between people as early as late December. Patients who had never been to the suspected source of the virus, the Huanan Seafood Market, were infected. Medical workers started falling ill.
But officials obstructed medical staff who tried to report such cases. They set tight criteria for confirming cases, where patients not only had to test positive, but samples had to be sent to Beijing and sequenced. They required staff to report to supervisors before sending information higher, Chinese media reports show. And they punished doctors for warning about the disease.
As a result, no new cases were reported for almost two weeks from Jan. 5, even as officials gathered in Wuhan for Hubei province’s two biggest political meetings of the year, internal China CDC bulletins confirm.
During this period, teams of experts dispatched to Wuhan by Beijing said they failed to find clear signs of danger and human-to-human transmission.
“China has many years of disease control, there’s absolutely no chance that this will spread widely because of Spring Festival travel,” the head of the first expert team, Xu Jianguo, told Takungpao, a Hong Kong paper, on Jan. 6. He added there was “no evidence of human-to-human transmission” and that the threat from the virus was low.
The second expert team, dispatched on Jan. 8, similarly failed to unearth any clear signs of human-to-human transmission. Yet during their stay, more than half a dozen doctors and nurses had already fallen ill with the virus, a retrospective China CDC study published in the New England Journal of Medicine would later show.
The teams looked for patients with severe pneumonia, missing those with milder symptoms. They also narrowed the search to those who had visited the seafood market — which was in retrospect a mistake, said Cowling, the Hong Kong epidemiologist, who flew to Beijing to review the cases in late January.
In the weeks after the severity of the epidemic became clear, some experts accused Wuhan officials of intentionally hiding cases.
“I always suspected it was human-to-human transmissible,” said Wang Guangfa, the leader of the second expert team, in a Mar. 15 post on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. He fell ill with the virus soon after returning to Beijing on Jan. 16.
Wuhan’s then-mayor, Zhou Xianwang, blamed national regulations for the secrecy.
“As a local government official, I could disclose information only after being authorized,” Zhou told state media in late January. “A lot of people didn’t understand this.”
As a result, top Chinese officials appear to have been left in the dark.
“The CDC acted sluggishly, assuming all was fine,” said a state health expert, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution. “If we started to do something a week or two earlier, things could have been so much different.”
It wasn’t just Wuhan. In Shenzhen in southern China, hundreds of miles away, a team led by microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung used their own test kits to confirm that six members of a family of seven had the virus on Jan. 12. In an interview with Caixin, a respected Chinese finance magazine, Yuen said he informed CDC branches “of all levels,” including Beijing. But internal CDC numbers did not reflect Yuen’s report, the bulletins show.
When the Thai case was reported, health authorities finally drew up an internal plan to systematically identify, isolate, test, and treat all cases of the new coronavirus nationwide.
Wuhan’s case count began to climb immediately — four on Jan. 17, then 17 the next day and 136 the day after. Across the country, dozens of cases began to surface, in some cases among patients who were infected earlier but had not yet been tested. In Zhejiang, for example, a man hospitalized on Jan. 4 was only isolated on Jan. 17 and confirmed positive on Jan. 21. Shenzhen, where Yuen had earlier found six people who tested positive, finally recorded its first confirmed case on Jan. 19.
The Wuhan Union Hospital, one of the city’s best, held an emergency meeting on Jan. 18, instructing staff to adopt stringent isolation — still before Xi’s public warning. A health expert told AP that on Jan. 19, she toured a hospital built after the SARS outbreak, where medical workers had furiously prepared an entire building with hundreds of beds for pneumonia patients.
“Everybody in the country in the infectious disease field knew something was going on,” she said, declining to be named to avoid disrupting sensitive government consultations. “They were anticipating it.”
Joint Chiefs chairman: U.S. intel investigating whether coronavirus leaked from Wuhan lab (Bill Gertz, The Washington Times, 2020-4-14)
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/14/mark-milley-us-intelligence-investigating-whether-/
U.S. intelligence agencies are investigating whether the coronavirus may have leaked from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday.
Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, the nation’s most senior military officer, told reporters at the Pentagon the initial assessments indicate the coronavirus causing the global pandemic appears to have been a “natural” event arising from animal-to-human transmission.
However, he noted published reports that the origin may have occurred as an escape from a research laboratory.
“It should be no surprise that we’ve taken a keen interest in that and we’ve had a lot of intelligence [agencies] take a hard look at that,” Gen. Milley said. “I would just say at this point it’s inconclusive although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural. But we don’t know for certain.”
The comments by the four-star general are the first time a senior American government official publicly raised the prospect that the virus may have originated from a Chinese laboratory.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, appearing with Gen. Milley, was asked if international inspectors should be stationed at Chinese laboratories in the future. Mr. Esper said it is something that will be looked at in the future as part of a “lessons learned” regarding the pandemic.
The outbreak began Dec. 1 in Wuhan and many of the first victims — but not all — were associated with a wild animal market in the city.
China Lab In Focus Of Coronavirus Outbreak (Forbes, 2020-4-14)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2020/04/14/the-washington-post-goes-rogue-china-lab-in-focus-of-coronavirus-outbreak/#530bc2cc1ee1
For months, anyone who said the new SARS coronavirus might have come out of a virology research lab in Wuhan, China was dismissed as a right wing xenophobe.
When Zero Hedge — a financial news website whose comment section certainly fits the right wing stereotype — first put out its own bombastic version of the bat-borne virus escaping a research lab, they were banned from Twitter.
FOX host Tucker Carlson starting banging this drum last week.
But on Tuesday, the narrative flipped. It’s no longer a story shared by China bears and President Trump fans. Today, Josh Rogin, who is said to be as plugged into the State Department as any Washington Post columnist, was shown documents dating back to 2015 revealing how the U.S. government was worried about safety standards at that Wuhan lab. In fact, they were worried that one day, one of these experiments — including the one on bat coronaviruses — could escape and become a global nightmare.
In a best case scenario, Rogin’s reveal may ultimately get China to cooperate more in regards to the origins of the virus, setting the table for better drugs to mitigate or even cure the deadly COVID-19. At the very least, for a government that likes to save face, the fact that the U.S. government helped build and fund the Wuhan virology lab in question should be enough for China to open that info vault to scientists at the World Health Organization.
“I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered,” Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley told Rogin. “To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future.”
China has not been forthcoming about the new SARS coronavirus origins. They’re not being entirely transparent, despite being heralded as such by some leaders.
An example of that secrecy from Rogin:
Worth noting, at least one young researcher from the lab —Huang Yanling — a graduate student rumored to be patient zero — was scrubbed from the lab’s website.“In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.”
The first, mysterious samples from infected individuals arrived at Wuhan Institute of Virology on December 30, 2019.
According to the Scientific American magazine, Shi Zhengli, a renown bat scientist in China, was told by the Institute’s director that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention — modeled after our own CDC — had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients. They were suffering from an odd pneumonia. They wanted her laboratory to investigate because the virus belonged to the same family of bat-borne viruses that caused SARS, a disease that — by comparison — only infected 8,100 people and killed just under 800 in an 8 month period in 2002-03.
“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she was quoted as saying by Scientific American on March 11. Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan had the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If bat coronaviruses were the culprit, she recalled to Scientific American, “could they have come from our lab?”
She has since promised the world that it did not come from her lab, though how she would know that for sure is unknown. We don’t know where she is. If she is making the media rounds on Chinese television, few in the U.S. would believe her at this point.
Her research on bat coronaviruses goes back to 2015. Here is one published in 2015 in Nature magazine. There is a lot of information about this new SARS, yet the world still seems stuck in the unknowns.
The U.S. government helped build and fund Wuhan virology labs. The thinking was that it was important for China to get up to par in the global life sciences. It was already a known center of previous outbreaks. Investing there and educating them on international safety standards was just preventative medicine.
Rogin’s reporting suggests that government officials were well aware of the research being conducted in the lab on bat coronaviruses and were worried that the lab still had sub-par safety standards.
Rogin’s article probably stemmed from conversations with someone inside the State Department boiling at the rim over many weeks as the U.S. faces a “stop the world” moment because of this pandemic.Rogin writes that, “What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”
Over the weekend, the Chinese government banned academic and other research institutions from publishing its research on coronaviruses on their websites.
The thinking there is, perhaps, that people in the U.S. and Europe are using those studies to place blame on the Chinese government. China has been working overtime to convince people that questioning the origin of the disease is racist.
The Washington Post story today brings the possibility of a lab leak into the mainstream. It moves the needle on getting a clearer handle on the origin of the virus, and that could eventually lead to more cooperation between the U.S. and China in making sure this does not happen again.
4 (Daseinsanalysis)
4/16 7:45 AM, sunny; 8:10 AM, 3 ER, all adm; 11:00 PM, one of them, fever around 4:00 PM, later we were notified that he worked at CGMH, had to be transferred to 負壓病房 B55 for 核酸檢測
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
State Department leaked cables renew theories on origin of coronavirus (Fox News, 2020-4-15)
https://www.foxnews.com/world/state-department-cables-coronavirus-origin-chinese-lab-bats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OO2WrpFjWY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OO2WrpFjWY
A Chinese laboratory at the center of new theories about how the coronavirus pandemic started was the subject of multiple urgent warnings inside the U.S. State Department two years ago, according to a new report.
U.S. Embassy officials warned in January 2018 about inadequate safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab and passed on information about scientists conducting risky research on coronavirus from bats, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Those cables have renewed speculation inside the U.S. government about whether Wuhan-based labs were the source of the novel coronavirus, although no firm connection has been established. The theory, however, has gained traction in recent days.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday afternoon, "It should be no surprise to you that we have taken a keen interest in that and we've had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that. I would just say at this point, it's inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural, but we don't know for certain."
The United Kingdom has said that the idea that the virus, which has turned into a full-blown global pandemic, was leaked from a Wuhan lab is "no longer being discounted."
A member of the U.K. government's emergency committee of senior officials claimed Sunday: "There is a credible alternative view (to the zoonotic theory) based on the nature of the virus. Perhaps it is no coincidence that there is a laboratory in Wuhan."
Foreign affairs expert Gordon Chang said in a recent opinion piece on Fox News that "many Chinese believe the virus either was deliberately released or accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a P4-level bio-safety facility."
He added: "This lab, known for studying coronaviruses, is not far from the market that had been initially identified as the source of the outbreak."
In a series of diplomatic cables labeled "Sensitive But Unclassified," U.S. Embassy officials warned that the lab had massive management weaknesses, posed severe health risks and warned Washington to get involved.
The first cable, which was obtained by the Post, also sent red flags about the lab's work on bat coronaviruses and more specifically how their potential human transmission represented the risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.
"During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory," the Jan.19, 2018 cable, written by two officials from the embassy's environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists, said.
The cable argued that the United States should give Chinese researchers at the Wuhan lab more support because its research on bat coronaviruses was important and dangerous. The lab had already been receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
The cable also called attention to Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who in November 2017 published a paper that showed the horseshoe bats collected from a case in Yunnan province were most likely from the same bat population that had been behind the first SARS coronavirus in 2003.
The cable states that "the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention."
Despite evidence that points to dangerous practices inside the Wuhan labs, top U.S. military brass, as well as other senior officials, have told Fox News that the origins of COVID-19 did not come from a laboratory nor was it the result of a bioweapon.
"And if I could just be clear, there is nothing to that," Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs told Fox News last week. "Someone asked me if I was worried. That is not something that I'm worried about. I think, you know, right now what we're concerned about is how do we treat people who are sick, how do we prevent people from getting sick. But no, I am not worried about this as a bioweapon."
Still, there are others who have been trying to trace the origin of the novel coronavirus back to the Wuhan lab.
Fox News' Jennifer Griffin and Lucas Tomlinson contributed to this report.
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